The Amazon.com review states that, "[i]n this greatly anticipated revised edition, Anderson updates and elaborates" his arguments first included in the 1991 edition and "revisits these fundamental ideas, showing how their relevance has been tested by the events of the past two decades." These notes, especially the first part, seemed to imply that Anderson had edited the entire book, making changes throughout - and thus, that it might prove worthwhile to get the new release.

But a quick trip to my local bookstore showed me otherwise: the *only new thing* in this edition is a 23-page afterword in which Anderson, indeed, "revisits" his main themes and ruminates on the book's international impact -- on that, Amazon was right. But they also seem to suggest other changes have been made (e.g. "updates and elaborates"). I compared numerous pages in the new and old editions at the bookshop - side by side - and found *absolutely no difference* with anything in the main text. Page numbers and even the particular words on each line correspond perfectly.

If you're interested in owning a copy of Anderson's mini-essay on the book's success, you might want to buy the new edition. Or, once your local town or college library gets a copy, you can drop a couple of bucks photocopying the afterword and simply slip it into your 1991 edition. The cover art looks a bit cooler and more modern on the new release . . . but I'm not sure that's worth $20.

Imagined Communities Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Benedict Anderson. 224 pp. London and New York, Verso. 1983. $23.95.

Benedict Richard O'Gorman Anderson was born on August 26, 1936 in Kunming, China to James O'Gorman and Veronica Beatrice Mary Anderson. In 1941 the Anderson family moved to California, where Benedict Anderson received his initial education.

In 1957, he received a BA in Classics from Cambridge University, England. There, he developed an immense interest in Asian politics, and later enrolled in Cornell University's Indonesian studies program. Working part-time as a teaching assistant in the department of politics, Anderson worked on
his Ph. D. under the guidance of experts in the field, George Kahin and Claire Holt. As part of his doctoral research, Anderson went to Jakarta, Indonesia, in 1961.

After the 1965 Communist Coup and massacres, Anderson published three studies, one of which was an outline of the Coup. This study, in which Anderson argues that "discontented army officers, rather than Communists, were responsible for [the] coup" and questions the military government's claims to legitimacy (Language 8) became known as the "Cornell Paper" in 1966, and it caused Anderson to be barred from Indonesia indeterminately.

After his exile, Anderson spent a few years in Thailand, and since then has been teaching at Cornell University. He is currently the director of the Modern Indonesia Program and the
Aaron L. Binenkorb professor of International Studies at Cornell. Anderson's infamous analysis of nationalism is presented in his book, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the
Origin and Spread of Nationalism.

Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism was first published in 1983. It has been widely studied and discussed in the intellectual community and it is as much criticized as it is praised. The following criticisms are an interesting take on his book.

1. In a book review written by Fadia Rafeedie, a graduate student and University Medalist at UC Berkeley, she voices the concern over the lack of representation of the Arab world in
Anderson's book. She asserts the importance of examining Arab nationalism, and raises the following points:

- Arabic is one of the world's only languages to have survived throughout history in its own classical form (as opposed to the other vernacular languages, which mostly stemmed from Lain roots), and the treatment of language as the key to evoking nationalist sentiments has been in existence "long before what a nation could be or was" (par. 2).
- Religion, whose demise in sovereignty was one of Anderson's reasons for the rise of nationalism, conversely "defined and still defines the way of life of the inhabitants of Arab countries and is reflected not just in government policies but in language and rituals" (par. 2).
- Whereas the nation-nesses of other countries have "modern" origins, Arab-ness has enjoyed mature linguistic, ethnic and geographic solidarity for a much longer time (pars. 2-4)

2. In a paper titled "Welfare-nationalism: Comparative aspects of the relation between sport and nationalism in Scandinavia in the inter-war years," Niels Kayser Nielsen, of Odense University in Denmark, makes the following comment:

- In Nielsen's view, Anderson's definition of nationalism fails to recognize nationalism as a "lived idea, an experience" (7). To Nielson, national identity is something that is acquired through an "articulation process, a creation" and is created, again and again, through the cognition of one's actions and physical behavior (7).

Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism defines the nation as an imagined political formation. It signifies for Anderson that the nation is "both inherently limited and sovereign". Specifically, he asks why Marxist political formations outside of Europe, such as those in Vietnam, Cambodia and China, have been grounded within national spaces. For Anderson, these formations confirm that the reality is quite plain: the 'end of the era of nationalism' so long predicted, is not remotely in sight. He sees the concept of the nation as a universal legitimate value in the political life of our time.

In the first chapter Anderson discusses nationality, nation-ness, and nationalism as being cultural artifacts whose creation toward the end of the 18th Century was the spontaneous
distillation of a complex ''crossing'' of discrete historical forces; but that, once created, they became ''modular,'' capable of being transplanted to a great variety of social terrain's, to merge and be merged with a variety of political and ideological constellations. Anderson says that theorists of nationalism have encountered three paradoxes: (1)The objective modernity of nations in the eye of the historian vs. their subjective antiquity in the eye of nationalists. (2) The formal universality of nationality as a socio-cultural concepts vs. the particularity of its concrete manifestations. (3) The political power of nationalism vs. its philosophical poverty.
In order to address some of these problems, Anderson proposes the following definition of nationalism: it is an imagined political community that is imagined as both inherently limited
and sovereign. It is imagined because members will never know most of their fellow-members, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion. It is limited because it has finite, though elastic boundaries beyond which lies other nations. It is sovereign because it came to maturity at a stage of human history when freedom was a rare and precious ideal. And it is imagined as a community because it is conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.

Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism strikes at the root of national pride by denying the existence of the nation altogether. He considers that nations have been imagined into existence and that they are not real entities.

When Benedict Anderson wrote Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism divesting the national imagination of all its claims to reality, was he hoping for a
world-nation? At the very outset, Anderson cites the lack of proximity of citizens as proof of the need to imagine the nation into existence. "It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion."

Let us say that Anderson is mistaken. But then, if a world community is unattainable and if nations are not imagined but tangible entities, is the sterile nation the only other alternative? Or is a national void a better bet, as Anderson seems to imply?

In the second chapter Anderson discusses the fact that nationalism has to be understood not in relation to self-consciously held political ideologies, but the large cultural systems that precede it. Nationalism occurred at a time when three other cultural conceptions were decreasing in importance. He states that first there were changes in the religious community.

Nationality represented a secular transformation of fatality into continuity, contingency into meaning. The uniformity of religion declined after the Middle Ages because of the effects of the explorations of the non-European world and the gradual demotion of the sacred language itself.

The older communities lost confidence in the unique sacredness of their languages and thus lost confidence in their ideas about admission to membership in the religious community.

Anderson states that next there were changes in the dynastic realm. In the past states were defined by high centers, borders were porous and indistinct, and sovereignties faded with one another. However, in the 17th Century, the legitimacy of the monarchy began its decline and people began to doubt the belief that society was naturally organized around high centers.

Finally Anderson says that there was a conception of temporality in which cosmology and history were indistinguishable. In the Middle Ages, time was thought to be simultaneous; the modern idea was of homogeneous, empty time. The idea of a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogenous, empty time is a precise analogue of the idea of the nation, which also is conceived as a solid community moving steadily through history. These three
changes according to Anderson lead to a search for a new way of linking fraternity, power, and time together.

In the third chapter Anderson focuses on the origins of the national consciousness. He sees print capitalism as laying the foundation in three ways: they created unified fields of
exchange and communication, they gave a new fixed form to language, they created languages-of-power of a kind different from the older administrative vernaculars.

In chapter five he sees the close of the era of successful national liberation movements in the Americas as coinciding with the onset of the age of nationalism in Europe. These ''new
nationalisms'' were different in two respects: 1.) national print languages were of central ideological and political importance, and 2.) the nation became something capable of being consciously aspired to.

In chapter six he considers the 19th Century as being the time when "official nationalism" developed in Europe as a response by power groups that were threatened with exclusion from popular imagined communities.

In chapter seven he feels that the last wave of nationalism was the result of the transformation of the colonial-state to the national state. He feels that, it was facilitated by three
factors: the increase in physical mobility, increasing bureaucratization, and the spread of modern-style education. This was all in response to imperialism which was made possible by the achievements of industrial capitalism. Official nationalism brought the idea of ''national histories'' into the nation's conscious. In addition, this last wave happened during a period of world history in which the nation was becoming the norm and it was now possible to ''model''
nation-ness in a more complex way then before.

Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism will remain as one of the most significant works of the last twenty years on nationalism. This book was extremely confusing at times to follow and not as organized as it could have been. Anderson's states in the acknowledgments of the book that he is, "a specialist
on Southeast Asia," so I expected the chapter on Southeast Asia to be slightly biased. But I encountered just the opposite as he failed to explore or explain in depth the chapter that deals with Southeast Asia which he is an expert on. He also fails to explore or explain in depth any other countries discussed in the entire book and he relies completely on just a few secondary sources. It was hard for me to be completely immersed and engrossed in this book all the way to the end because of the complexity. It was an extremely difficult book to really understand completely in reading it the first time. It was necessary for me to read several chapters more then one time to really understand what he is talking about. This book helped to increase my knowledge of nationalism in a different context. Anderson does not offer a final answer on why nationalism has inspired so many people to die in wars and revolutions.

Having read this book as a graduate student finishing my Master of Arts Degree in History I thought the book would be easier to understand. I would strongly recommend this book for graduate history students focusing on learing more about nationalism and the general public who are highly intellectual and have a passion for history and nationalism in a different context.

Rachel D. Dvorkin

Benedict Anderson's "Imagined Communities" is justifiably a classic of political science and history. Its impact on the study of nationalism - which is arguably the ideology most resistant to academic study - can hardly be measured.

Anderson, a specialist in South-East Asian history, lets his scholarly instincts roam across the entire world as he seeks to explain just why it is that nationalism has become so prevalent in the world. What factors have meant that we take pride in someone dying "for our nation", while we don't take the same pride in someone dying "for our political beliefs"?
The answer, somewhat surprisingly, begins with a description of the origins and impact of the printing press. Anderson's argument, particularly the section most well-known to his readers, is that the ability of those living in a particular place to read in their own language (as against Latin, Arabic, Sanskrit or Chinese) began this process. It was enhanced, he contends, with the production of newspapers, allowing people to "imagine" themselves as Peruvian or Chilean, rather than as Spanish colonials.
Yes, the choices of nation were used advisedly above, as Anderson's second striking conclusion is that nationalism is a new-world (i.e. the Americas) phenomenon. The "Creole" intelligentsia, allowed to progress only so far by their colonial rulers, became the fertile ground necessary for nationalist ideals.

Anderson also discusses "official" nationalism in some depth, focusing on Europe and making some quite surprising comments regarding the penetration of the various vernacular languages into their respective empires.
This analysis seems a little more forced at times, but the general point remains that a "nation" is essentially a modern and "imagined" community.

The revised edition of this work also goes into some detail about the roles of censuses, maps and museums in the creation of nationalism. Using his South-East Asian training, Anderson is able to explain such things as the importance of West Papua to Indonesia, despite the marked cultural differences between most Indonesians and citizens of that province.
While this analysis is self-consciously global in scope, Anderson is modest enough to remind the reader that his training is in one region alone. This is a refreshing change from many scholars, who propound theories of global scope based only on observations of a limited series of events.

"Imagined Communities" is, as indicated above, a read of considerable intellectual robustness. It is not, however, a read for the casual history-reader. Anderson makes many demands on his readers, not the least of which is to follow his logic which is not always entirely apparent. With that in mind, the book can be recommended to all with an academic interest in history, but with considerable reservations to those without.